IDE's for PHP Development or PHP Development Softwares

May 20th, 2009

Integrated Development Environment or IDE in short . I am some what an active user in the php classes group . Recently an editor was the talk . He actually was looking for a debugger , and many people came with different solutions . I have tried Netbeans , Eclipse, Aptana and Zend Studio . Just installed and run some samples that’s all what I have an experince with IDE for PHP. These IDE’s are used by php developer , download and try. Many PHP IDE’s like Netbeans , Eclipse , Aptana etc are free php developer softwares. Some commercial php developer softwares are also available. But thought of writing some of the editors that I was new. Netbeans : A wonderful opensource IDE from Sun Microsystems . Used for developing Java applications mainly. Now supporting PHP development too . It was really useful when I was developing a Java application for the mini project . Jose Antony was the one who introduced Netbeans and Eclipse before us. It helped us a lot to develop the application some what quickly, even though we were new to it . Eclipse : Another opensource IDE used for Java application development mainly . Now supporting PHP development with additional plugins . Eclipse may be some what popular than Netbeans . You can download PDT which is a stand alone . Aptana : This is really new to me . This is one that I have got from the discussions . I was not aware of Aptana , its an opensource IDE by community and also have a commercial one which is based on Eclipse IDE. You can download Aptana as a plugins for Eclipse. Really a wonderful tool for developers . Some of the features that I have not seen in Netbeans , Eclipse etc is the html view as shown in a browser itself. Thats really a cool feature. Aptana will not run in 64 bit edition for now . It can be used as a plugin for Eclipse if you are using 64bit in GNU/Linux . Some more configurations are needed for running Aptana in Ubuntu . Zend Studio : The IDE for PHP developed by Zend , the one who supports PHP . All can download Zend Studio, a 30 day trial for free from Zend. Its also an eclipse based IDE . Has many features when you are working on Zend framework an open-source framework for PHP, like symfony-project , cake , code ignitter , yii etc . You can use simple editors too for PHP development, its your choice to select the one which suits you really. Nusphere : PHPed or Nusphere is a commercial IDE for PHP development like zend studio. I have not tried but many are recommending this. I don’t know the importance of this when zend studio is there . Link : http://www.nusphere.com/ These IDE ’s are platform independent as they are developed in Java , so will run on Windows , GNU / Linux or Unix operating system . I am using Ubuntu 9.04 and this runs without any problem. You cannot compare these IDE’s with dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is built for designers than for programmers . If you are looking for a Dreamweaver like one for GNU/Linux you can go for Quanta plus or Screem . If you are just a designer then you can go for Kompozer , which is similar to dreamweaver ( Don’t think its exactly as dreamweaver ). The use of a PHP IDE is not just syntax highlighting . When you are using a MVC or just a class the methods and properties can be viewed by just ctrl+ space . This is a really helpful feature when you are coding in MVC architecture .